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Good Morning. Tuesday’s report on Oxfam’s activities in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake makes grim reading. ‘Over a period of years,’ said the Charity Commission chief executive, ‘Oxfam's internal culture tolerated poor behaviour, and at times lost sight of the values it stands for.’ For Christians, charity is rooted in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, who rather than walking by on the other side, at great sacrifice bent down to assist a man left half-dead by robbers. It also arises from Matthew’s account of the six acts of mercy, in which we learn that any time we encounter a person facing serious hardship we encounter Jesus himself. Thus to transform compassion into an opportunity for abuse and exploitation is not only a crime and a misuse of donor’s funds but a grotesque reversal of the whole notion of charity. No one’s pretending the problem lies with Oxfam alone. As a priest I lament that churches too have long covered up egregious crimes in a mistaken attempt to preserve reputation and suppress truth. But there’s a cultural and political backdrop to this tawdry tale of exposure and denial. We live in a pragmatic time when it’s commonplace to say that a politician should be judged not on character but on positive policy outcomes; when to be effective is everything, to be good is a bonus. So you can perhaps imagine someone thinking, ‘So long as lives are saved in Haiti, and disaster is avoided, we can turn a blind eye to the actions of the aid workers that delivered those results.’ What this points up is the difference I perceive between an organisation and an institution. An organisation is a means to an end. It’s a provisional arrangement to get a job done. How it achieves that purpose is secondary. An institution is different. It’s a keeper of standards and a bearer of trust. It’s judged not just by what it gets done but by how it functions. What I suspect could be happening in our culture is that many things long assumed to be institutions – universities, the Â鶹Éç, Parliament, the NHS – are becoming widely regarded as organisations, judged increasingly by output, not by procedure or character. In this context we can hear the Haiti report as saying, ‘No, an international aid agency is an institution. It’s not simply the deliverer of medicine and shelter. It’s the bearer of public conscience about global inequality, postcolonial guilt, and structural injustice. How it behaves is as significant as what it achieves.’ The word ‘institution’ has too long been treated as a synonym for ‘outdated, complacent and exclusive.’ The Haiti revelations are telling me that we forget the nature and purpose of institutions at our peril.